#cantu-ledesma

[nmtkmrnke]

[myrecordcollections]

Jefre Cantu-Ledesen

A Year With 13 Moons

@ 2014 EU Pressing

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Despite the shoegazing sonics, the title of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's A Year With 13 Moons looks skyward: this is a star-crossed album, in multiple ways. It was recorded after the dissolution of the prolific experimental musician's marriage, a breakup that sent him back to the Bay Area after several years in Germany. And it was meant for release on a different label—a plan that fell through, for reasons unclear and perhaps unimportant, given that Mexican Summer gave the record a good home, and, potentially, a larger audience than Cantu-Ledesma is used to with his own Root Strata imprint. So it's striking how much cool remove characterizes Cantu-Ledesma's own description of the record. He writes of his interest in "conveying memory in music without being sentimental," and of "translating the fog of images, people, and places that I've experienced in the last two years into a body of work that could still be ambiguous and leave space for the listener to enter."

The resulting album is plenty ambiguous—its outlines diffuse, its composition unstable. It was recorded on a spartan setup during a three-month residency at Marin County's Headlands Center for the Arts: just guitar, effects pedals, laptop, and multiple tape machines, all run through a PA system in a huge, barnlike studio on the former military base. It's not so much recorded to tape as smeared across it. Heavily distorted, its fidelity often mangled beyond the point of recognition, it suggests solids crumbling like chalk—or, conversely, mist on the verge of taking a physical form. It is a sound of transitory states, of in-betweenness, of becoming undone.

Fuzz is nothing new for Cantu-Ledesma, who is also a bandmate of Liz Harris (aka Grouper) in the duo Raum; his 2010 album Love Is a Stream bore hallmarks of Fennesz and William Basinski, artists who make the most of decaying layers. But what's different here is the physicality of the work—the scope, the heft—paired with the way that, for the first time, he seems to be moving towards something like song structure, as with the slow-moving melody of "Remembering", or the blown-out new wave of "At the End of Spring" and "Love After Love". This isn't the first time that drum machines turn up in his music, but they're foregrounded here as never before. That very specific combination of elements—the ringing guitar tones and flat, dry, electronic thwacks—will inevitably suggest comparisons with Durutti Column; Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd's The Moon and the Melodies is another reference point, though Cantu-Ledesma's waterlogged-tape timbres and power-sander effects give the album its own specific mood and feel. Those echoes aren't so much end points as seeds, and in the fertile soil of his convoluted signal chain, they blossom into some truly incredible shapes, like the kicked-amplifier complaints of "Remains" and the keening feedback of "Mirror of Past & Future", which sounds like a blood-sugar crash translated to voltage.

[quarter-life-report]

Mumdance w/ Jafre Cantu-Ledesma - 13th June 2017 by Rinse FM

[lflip]

Rough mash up of seven volumes of recordings, each roughly 40min long, made while as an Artist in Residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts (with filmmaker Paul Clipson) March - May, 2013, Marin Headlands, Northern California. All seven volumes are available via Bandcamp as a digital download or CD-R in a run of 25 artist editions. Vol. 1 - Another Void Vol. 2 - Disappear Vol. 3 - Wild River Vol. 4 - A World Apart Vol. 5 - The Burnt House Vol. 6 - Archaic Torso Vol. 7 - Gift Of Tongues

[discoursesofthewithered]

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Where You End And I Begin (by BounceBiomehanika)